If I were to attempt to give you all the early history of the ground on which the Savoy stands I should have to delve back to Tudor times, and the Savoy Palace and the politics of that very turbulent period. For me, however, the past history of the Savoy begins with the time when the Savoy Theatre was built on reclaimed ground and opened in 1881. The offices of the theatre were in Beaufort House, which stood on the hill, and beside the theatre was a space of rough waste land, much like the County Council's wilderness in Aldwych. On this unoccupied land Mr D'Oyly Carte put up a shed to house the electric light plant for the theatre, for the Savoy was the first theatre in London that used electric light. The Savoy Hotel and Restaurant eventually rose where the electric light shed first stood, and they were opened in 1889. The hotel and restaurant then faced the Embankment, and had no Strand frontage. To get to the restaurant one had either to do a glissade in a hansom down the steep Savoy hill to the side entrance which led into a courtyard, in the centre of which stood a majolica fountain, or to go to the front entrance opposite to the Embankment Gardens. The restaurant was smaller than it is now; it was panelled with mahogany; it had a red and gold frieze and a ceiling of dead gold. It was a very comfortable restaurant, and the mahogany walls gave it a homelike feeling, though, of course, they absorbed a great deal of the light. The private rooms, named after the various Gilbert and Sullivan operas, were, as they are now, next to the restaurant. The grill-room was tucked away in the middle of a block of buildings. There was below the restaurant a _table d'hôte_ dining-room, and on the garden level was a ballroom and its ante-rooms. The balcony was but half its present width. No block of buildings has been more greatly improved from time to time than the Savoy has been. There has hardly been a year without some adornment being added, and in 1904 the largest additions during the history of the hotel were completed, and the hotel and restaurant gained their Strand outlet.